Your business is a crack house

The Dallas Observer has an amazing article on a story that the Dallas Morning News has apparently completely missed. Corruption on a massive scale is going down in big-D where they're using nuisance laws to screw with local businesses:

The central accusation against the city is that it misappropriated a law aimed at crack houses and hot-sheet motels and used it instead to oppress and gouge legitimate businesses. Under the guise of nuisance abatement, the city sends police SWAT teams into respectable businesses, files suit against them and engages in other scare tactics, witnesses said, in order to get things out of them.

"We had diverse businesses and individuals unconnected to each other who gave startlingly similar stories about these threats," Keel tells me. "One witness swore that he was encouraged to give a donation to a particular local official's birthday fund and on other occasions was told to hire certain people to avoid this problem."

The investigation is being headed up by State Rep. Terry Keel who says, "I can argue that this evidence at a minimum--at a minimum--shows that the city of Dallas was in essence targeting lawful businesses in high-crime areas for this type of enforcement action in an attempt to make the businesses pay for the privilege of being protected by the police."

It's not often that we here at CruzBustamante.com support anything Republicans do - after all, they've never made an honest living in their lives, but if this article is even half true then here's hoping that the Rs and Ds can come together and get rid of the city hall officials acting like goodfellas.